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{"id":18393,"date":"2016-09-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=144"},"modified":"2016-09-23T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-23T00:00:00","slug":"postmodern-manicheanism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/09\/postmodern-manicheanism\/","title":{"rendered":"Postmodern Manicheanism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I<\/span>n his published conversation with Zygmunt Bauman about Liquid Evil<\/em><\/a>, Leonidas Donskis observes that \u201c<\/span>Optimism is, above all, a Christian construction \u2013 it\u2019s based on the faith that good can overcome evil and that unexplored possibilities and alternatives can always be found.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Christianity\u2019s influence has declined in the West, so has optimism. \u201cWe live in an age of pessimism,\u201d one ripe with ancient beliefs about the irradicable nature of evil. Donskis points out that \u201cthe twentieth century was excellent proof evil was alive and well,\u201d and that has led to a revival of manicheanism, the ancient dualism that treats good and evil, light and dark, as equally powerful principles of the world. Many in the past century have concluded that the \u201cworld . . . could be temporarily abandoned by God, but not by Satan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eastern Europe in particular is awash in Manicheanism: \u201cBulgakov\u2019s enduring work The Master and Margarita<\/a><\/em>\u2014written in 1928\u201341 and published, severely censored, in 1966\u20137\u2014is imbued with a Manichaean spirit: the novel makes numerous mentions of the concepts of \u2018Light\u2019 and \u2018Dark\u2019 developed by the Persian prophet and eponymous architect of this belief system. . . . interpretation of evil in this great twentieth-century East European novel (Kafka\u2019s The Trial<\/a><\/em> is in my eyes the great Central European novel of the twentieth century) is one that asserts the self-sufficiency of evil. This interpretation of Christianity is close to that of Ernest Renan in his Life of Jesus<\/a><\/em>, a study with which Bulgakov was quite familiar.\u201d<\/p>\n

He generalizes: \u201cAll of the great East Europeans were Manichaeans to some degree\u2014from Russia\u2019s Bulgakov through to George Orwell (who was an East European by choice).\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"